These colorful stories are not meant to be humorous or making fun of patients, but were presented to us as a sampling of the myriad of delicate issues encountered in a hospital. They are, conveniently, stories having to do with the abdomen, because we're covering that region this month. I'm reproducing them here because I am fascinated by the pathos inherent in each.
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An ER resident was called in late one evening to see the case of a man, in his early 20's, with a bowel obstruction. Upon entering the room, the resident heard a persistent buzzing noise and couldn't identify it.
He asked the man, "Do you hear that buzzing? Or is it just me?"
The man replied, " Um doc, yeah that's me."
The resident asked, "So can you tell me what happened?"
The man, timidly, recounted the story of how his girlfriend had stuck a small vibrator up his anal canal, and it got stuck there. Previous attempts at another hospital to try to remove it using an enema did not work, and actually pushed the object further up, pass the bend into the colon.
The resident then asked, " So how long have the buzzing been going on?"
The man replied, "The vibrator has been on the whole time...we just changed batteries..."
The resident ordered an x-ray, which confirmed the location of the object. Using a rubber covered metal wire, which was bent to resemble a hook, the resident went fishing for the vibrator. He managed to grab hold of the object and drag it back toward the anal canal, when the man exclaimed " Okay doc, I think I got it now..." The man then forced a bowel movement that ejected the black, plastic, still buzzing vibrator.
The resident proceeded to clean up, when the man asked: "Um, so doc, can I keep the thing?"
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A 3rd year medical student doing his psychiatric rotation was called down for a consultation on a patient on the surgery ward. Reading the patient's chart, he found the following story:
"the patient had a ruptured colon due to his partner fisting him in an act termed 'spleening' whereby the goal was to travel through the colon to reach the spleen and massage it in an effort to induce a 'high'. According to the patient, he was high on crystal meth during the act, and did not notice the pain. The ruptured colon had to be surgically tied at two ends, with the descending colon emptying bowels into an externally placed bag, and the anal canal tied off for at least 6 weeks in order for the colon to recover. The primary reason for the psychiatric consult: the surgeons didn't know how to assess whether the patient might attempt fisting again, thus rupturing the colon before it could heal. They thought a psych consult would know how to do it better.
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An 82-year-old woman comes into the ER complaining of pain in her lower abdomen. An abdominal X-ray revealed the presence of a bottle cap inside her vagina. The attending kindly asked the woman: "I see what looks like a bottle cap here, could you tell me what happened?" The woman replied, " Well, it was my 82nd birthday yesterday...and I felt lonely after my husband died..." (Apparently this case is a common one, as in beer bottles used as dildos can sometime loose their top, or in other cases, glass objects may break inside the vagina, thus requiring surgical intervention)
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A 30 yr old man comes in and complains of lower abdominal pain, claiming that he "accidentally sat on the sprinkler" after an x-ray reveals the sprinkler head well within his anal canal.
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